The 'Red Terror' and the Spanish Civil War: Revolutionary Violence in Madrid

ISBN-13: 9781107054547 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 395 str.

Julius Ruiz

Opis

This book deals with one of most controversial issues of the Spanish Civil War (1936 1939): the Red Terror. Approximately 50,000 Spaniards were extrajudically executed in Republican Spain following the failure of the military rebellion in July 1936. This mass killing of fascists seriously undermined attempts by the legally constituted Republican government to present itself in foreign quarters as fighting a war for democracy. This study, based on a wealth of scholarship and archival sources, challenges the common view that executions were the work of criminal or anarchist uncontrollables. Its focus is on Madrid, which witnessed at least 8,000 executions in 1936. It shows that the terror was organized and was carried out with the complicity of the police, and argues that terror was seen as integral to the antifascist war effort. Indeed, the elimination of the internal enemy the Fifth Column was regarded as important as the war on the front line."

Recenzje

'His thoroughly researched and clear-eyed analysis of revolutionary terror and politically motivated killings in the city of Madrid goes a long way toward filling a noticeable gap in the historiography of the subject … The 'Red Terror' and the Spanish Civil War … provides the fullest and most factually reliable portrait of a particularly murky chapter of the Civil War.' George Esenwein, The Journal of Modern History

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. On the brink; 2. The military rebellion; 3. Antifascist Madrid; 4. Forging the new police; 5. The justice of the people; 6. If it is the will of the people…; 7. Popular tribunals and the Rearguard Vigilance Militias (MVR); 8. A fifth column?; 9. The prison problem; 10. Paracuellos; 11. The dirty war against the fifth column; 12. Dealing with the legacy of the terror: forced labor for fascists, 1937–9; Epilogue; Appendices.